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Comment by thebean11 | Hacker News Reader

Blaming outside instigators is a common tactic for downplaying unrest.

I'm not saying you're wrong, and I agree Russia does run campaigns with the purpose of sowing tensions, but I'm very skeptical of any causality between Russia and the movement, protests, or riots.

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#dcBlackout was trending on Twitter last night. How do you explain that? There were _tons_ of accounts I saw (many with Korean/Chinese avatars, which were probably fronts) that were spreading the same misinformation, often were a shrill tone of panic and conspiracy.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-dc-blackout-pro...

For the curious, this is called a Sybil attack.

Like I said, I'm not arguing that the foreign misinformation campaigns don't exist. I'm just skeptical that the protests and riots wouldn't be happening regardless.

Boi the replies.

https://twitter.com/DMVBlackLives/status/1267521033273323520...

https://twitter.com/VictoriaSanchez/status/12674378765198622...

I am wondering if all those are bots or propaganda accounts. A sufficiently trained GPT2 model could tweet the same.

was thinking maybe it was content targetted at a non-us audience. could see deploying bots in open disinfo op, tho.

If there is unrest it is easy to stoke from anywhere. You have Marx living in london, lenin hanging out in germany.

The point is. An under served population can be insighted with ideas from anywhere. But the root cause is still there in that community.

"Underserved"? The US President retweets anonymous fake account misinformation. Almost anyone can be incited by convenient disinformation.

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